The Ivy League in the Age of Obama

Each year, The Harvard Crimson conducts a survey of graduating seniors. The sample may not be perfectly representative. Nevertheless, the survey offers a fascinating windows into the lives and expectations of the next generation of the American elite. Among the highlights:

On geography:

• 42 percent came to Harvard from the Northeast. 55 percent will stay in the region after graduation.

On post-graduation plans:

• 61 percent of graduates will be employed next year. 18 percent will enter graduate school right away. The rest will pursue fellowships or travel or are among the 10 percent who have not yet determined their post-graduation plans.

• Of those who will be working, the most popular industry is consulting, drawing 16 percent of employed seniors.

• Another 15 percent will be working in finance, nearly doubling the 9 percent who entered the sector last year but still paling in comparison to 2007, when before the financial crisis, 47 percent of graduating seniors went into finance.

Asked what industry they would like to be working in ten years from now, students made very different choices.

• The consulting sector went from the very top choice to the very bottom. Just 1 percent see themselves as 32-year-old consultants.

• 5 percent said they still want to be working in finance.

• Health was by far the dominant field of choice in students’ 10-year plans, attracting 20 percent of students.

• 11 percent would like to be working in arts, sports, or entertainment, though just 5 percent will start out there.

• 9 percent envision a career in government or politics, though only 4 percent will pursue one right away.

On drinking and drugs:

• 9 percent never drink, and 7 percent drink less than once a month.

• 38 percent of students have tried marijuana, and 3 percent use it more than twice a week.

• 16 percent of the class has tried at least one of cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms, LSD, and other illicit substances.

• 9 percent of the class has used drugs like Adderall and Ritalin.

On sex:

• 72 percent enroll at Harvard as virgins and 27 percent graduate without having sex. Of those who do have sex at Harvard, most have just one partner during their four years, but 7 percent of students have 10 or more sexual partners in college.

So much for the numbers. What does it all mean? Here are a few tentative interpretations.

The Northeast, and particularly New York, remains a magnet for the highly credentialed. In addition to the large number of students it sends to Harvard and similar universities, it draws many young people from other parts of the country. The South, by contrast, is anathema to this cohort. Just 8% of graduating seniors plan to live South of the Mason-Dixon line, even though the area is home to many of America’s fastest growing cities.

That’s partly because they’re attracted to lucrative industries based in Manhattan. Wall Street isn’t as popular as it once was, but 31% of graduating seniors still plan to work in finance or high-end business services.

On the other hand, Harvard seniors don’t expect to like the jobs they have lined up. By considerable margins, they hope to make their way in health, media, or politics instead. This suggests that students’ attraction to business rests less on real interest, or even greed, than on the need to repay the debts that they have assumed to pay for their fancy degrees. They hope to work hard, save their money, and get out as soon as possible.

Contrary to popular imaginations of student life as a four year party, these seniors are a pretty restrained bunch. Most drink and have smoked pot. But heavy drugs are distinctly unpopular, as are the study drugs that are supposed to be an epidemic among college students.

The same goes for sex. Most Harvard students enter as a virgins and graduate having had just one sexual partner. For all the hysteria about the hookup culture, I bet that’s not too far from the norm of half a century ago. The difference is that members of the class of ’63 would have been more likely to marry their lone partner than today’s seniors.

More could be said about these numbers, which are accompanied by infographics here. On the whole, however, the Crimson surveys present a picture of thoroughly conventional, and in some ways timid group of young men and women. They’ll do fine: almost all Harvard seniors who looked for full time work seems to have found it and many expect to earn high salaries. But they seem to have set their sights relatively low, preferring the familiar to new possibilities.

It would be a mistake to call these students “conservative”. But the first generation of Ivy Leaguers to come of age under Obama is more likely to be characterized by discipline and sobriety than the hope and change they were promised six years ago.

MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

Hide 25 comments

25 Responses to The Ivy League in the Age of Obama

“But the first generation of Ivy Leaguers to come of age under Obama is more likely to be characterized by discipline and sobriety than the hope and change they were promised six years ago.”

…huh? I’m missing the connection between people’s personal lives and Obama’s stated goal to change the way Washington does politics. Until conservatives stop equating normality with conservatism they’ll never understand where liberals are coming from and the fact that y’all equate hard drugs and sex with liberalism betrays a world outlook that hasn’t been updated since the glory days on Nixon hippie-bashing.

That’s pretty damned scary. Look at the mess the elites made of things in the last decade or so. Wouldn’t the goal be to have more jobs, more economic security, more socio-economic mobility, more opportunity for all Americans, or are conservatives satisfied with another decade of stagnating wages, offshored jobs, the rich getting fabulously richer and even more people on food stamps?

Somehow, I would think that given the last decade or so, some hope and change would be what’s called for. More of the same doesn’t seem like much to aspire to.

But the first generation of Ivy Leaguers to come of age under Obama is more likely to be characterized by discipline and sobriety than the hope and change they were promised six years ago.

Indeed. This survey data about employment and lifestyle choices demonstrates unequivocally that Ivy Leaguers have forsaken the notion of “hope and change” for the discipline and sobriety they learned from the Bush presidency when they were in high school.

Overall interesting article, but I think your last sentence stretches way too far in trying to link this information to presidential politics. The one thing that all of these students have in common is that they already see the path to the top standing before them with all doors already open. By virtue of being Harvard students, they are already part of the elite; it only remains for them to choose which of the “up escalators” to step onto.

The “hope and change” message had nothing to do with this group. Some of them will choose to be politically liberal, others will choose to be politically conservative, but none of them will be personally affected much by which party occupies the White House at any given time.

My take is I bet most of these percentages have not changed a whole lot the last 50 or so years. (OK the use of marijuana is probably statistically more significant.) The honest truth is to graduate from Harvard or any Ivy League School you don’t have a lot of time to hookup and use any hard drugs on a regular basis. Probably the biggest difference today is the number of people married, engaged or pregnant (or got a girl pregnant) has fallen quite of bit. Long term to achieve huge success it does take Victorian values.

Only 36% say they have tried marijuana? PLEASE. I’d bet it is more like double that number at least. I attended an Ivy-like “big name” school for undergrad, then Ivy League for grad school, and I knew almost nobody in seven years at those two institutions who hadn’t tried smoking pot, even though most of them didn’t ever do it regularly, or even do it again at all.

Maybe they should smoke MORE marijuana if it will relax them and temper their burning desire to control and dictate to the rest of us through government.

P.S. Harvard’s undergrad student body is greatly overrated in my experience. Harvard undergrad and especially Harvard Law grads get jobs because they have a HUGE network and disproportionately hire Harvard alumni. One of the most smug, overrated groups of people I’ve ever seen, and responsible for much of the destruction of our freedom, our prosperity, and our way of life due to their overwhelmingly disproportionate roles in government and the media.

Reading the above “statistics” of the Swells that attend the Ivy League schools reinforces the fact that these nerds that were for the most part social misfits prior to college are the misfits in adult life that will be rapidly pushed into positions of influence.
No wonder we are in trouble as a nation. We have set up a system where nerdy leftist elite swells drive the loony bus.

On a vacation with my wife and kids in Boston, we rode our bikes to MIT then to Harvard. It was all very interesting. and I bought a Harvard shirt at the bookstore to remember my afternoon visit.

Later in the summer I was at a bar on an island called Put-In-Bay in Lake Erie drinking with my friends wearing the Harvard T-shirt. This young lady next to me looks at me and asked if I attended Harvard. As a joke I said “yes” and I was going to follow-up with “for about 4 hours”. My friend jumped at this and said ” well actually he finished at Harvard, he started at MIT”. She looked at her boyfriend and whispered, ” boy he has to be REALLY smart!” I laughed,and whispered to my friends, “smart enough to by a T-shirt”

This suggests that students’ attraction to business rests less on real interest, or even greed, than on the need to repay the debts that they have assumed to pay for their fancy degrees.

Except that virtually no one graduating from Harvard College is burdened with onerous debt. For the Class of 2010, for example, the 34 percent of students who borrowed graduated with an average debt load of $10,102. [source]

I am also disappointed in the lack of science, or at less the lack of questions asked about science in the survey.

Drugs are like sex at most high ranking schools– lots of people try drugs, and maybe go through a phase using them semi-regularly, but no one has the time or inclination to turn it into a lifestyle. Everyone is way too busy and disciplined.

If anything, the problem with places like Harvard is that the culture of the place and the rewards available guide people towards very low-risk, fixed paths and discourage risk taking or creative thinking about careers and future paths. On the other hand, this is the way the American economy was designed: there are massive rewards available to a few people who have those opportunities, and those who can take those opportunities will do so rather than do anything with great unknowns and the potential to permanently forgo rewards while risking great insecurity.

I understand where the idea that this doesn’t represent “Hope and Change” comes from… but honestly it’s an idea stuck in the early 1970s. And frankly that’s one reason that the right is losing on college campuses right now, it’s fighting battles that the present generation has moved on from.

So 72% come to Harvard as virgins and then go on to have an average of Only 1 sexual partner? And they say this class is under lawyered? Sure. It all depends on the definitions and the technicalities, right? Then how it it also possible that 13% of the class manages to claim to make the Harvard Library the venue for at least one tryst? Seems incongruous somehow.

“But the first generation of Ivy Leaguers to come of age under Obama is more likely to be characterized by discipline and sobriety than the hope and change they were promised six years ago.”

But after the imprudent and self-indulgent excesses of conservative government in the Bush years, discipline and sobriety was exactly the change many of us hoped for six years ago! And that we are, largely, getting from the president, if not yet from the radical-chic extremists who call themselves “conservative” on the nation’s airwaves and capital buildings.

There is a reason the generation in question, which is in practice and temperament quite conservative, is the least likely of any in living memory to identify as “conservative” in the political arena or vote for candidates who so identify.

Personal sobriety of life has little or nothing to do with political “conservatism.” Many blue-state liberals have “blue marriages” (see the book Red Marriage, Blue Marriage), low divorce rates, low out-of-wedlock birth rates. They support policies thought of as liberal, though: pro-choice, pro-gay rights; pro-progressive taxation, and so on.